One thing about anxiety: it's a very powerful feeling, and us humans give a lot of weight and meaning to powerful feelings and whatever or whomever elicits them in us. We seek these feelings, want them, find our edges in them, a mix of comfort and thrill and identity. Easy example: amusement parks. Those are places built to trigger a high-octane range of "feeling"—much of it kind of anxious—to sate that somewhat universal human craving. The feelings we feel on those rides are very real, and yet the circumstances that are producing them are, all in all, pretty superficial.

I didn't pull that example out of a hat at random. Amusement parks are where we find rollercoasters—and love, of course, is often romanticized as being a "rollercoaster." So when we meet people who give us whiplash, who throw us from states of highs to states of lows—well, we sometimes process all that as signs of a potent connection. And yet: it's kind of like an amusement park, in that none of it is quite as deep as we'd like, since, of course, so much of what we're frustrated by (what you're frustrated by) is the sense that these consuming feelings (fear, anxiety, jealousy, whatever) are getting in the way of a more "real" relationship, a more enriching form of love and connection.

I'm being a bit existential, yeah, but to try to make a point. While I don't think you necessarily "like" feeling anxious, I do think part of what you're drawn to in him is that he triggers anxiety, that he, or being with him, or spinning out about his social media habits, provides that rollercoaster-like sensation. You said it yourself: your anxiety has gotten so much worse in this relationship, which is to say you've made a choice, if not quite consciously, to engage in something that spikes your anxiety levels.

Why? Stabbing in the dark—just trying to give you some footholds here to help with processing—I wonder if, on some level, you conflated this relationship with some of what you're working through in therapy. In other words, perhaps some part of your mind thinks: if you could learn to handle this anxiety with him, then it meant you were doing well in getting your anxiety under control rather than being controlled by it. Or something.

Except the brass tacks here are literally as surface-level and superficial as it get: hot girls on Instagram. Think about that for a moment. Turn that prism every which way, and it's very hard to find a story in which two people become closer by "working through" an issue involving hot girls on Instagram. It's the rollercoaster: real feeling supplied by...well, by nonsense. All these big concepts—trust, respect, disrespect—being connected to some random who seeks "likes" by posting her butt on social media and a dude who supplies one of those "likes." Sigh....

Somewhere in this ramble I'm also trying to tell you that you have no reason to be humiliated. You're living, learning, and odds are your time with him has not been 24/7 torture. Whatever has been good—well, great, that's stuff to flag as good for you, healthy, and stuff to find outside the amusement park, if that makes sense. You may have needed this chapter to discover that nothing is quite as radical as a romantic connection where a sense of calm is the dominant feeling—the one that expands, and deepens, in time, rather than the reverse.